"Commentary from P.M. Carpenter"

March 19, 2018

D.C. Council member Trayon White Sr. (D-Ward 8) posted [a] video to his official Facebook page at 7:21 a.m. [Sunday] as snow flurries were hitting the nation’s capital. The video, shot through the windshield of a car driving west on Interstate 695 through downtown Washington, shows snowy skies while White narrates.

"Man, it just started snowing out of nowhere this morning, man. Y’all better pay attention to this climate control, man, this climate manipulation," he says…. "And that’s a model based off the Rothschilds controlling the climate to create natural disasters they can pay for to own the cities, man. Be careful."

The Rothschilds are a famous European business dynasty descended from Mayer Amschel Rothschild, an 18th-century Jewish banker who lived in what is today Frankfurt, Germany. The family has repeatedly been subject over the years to anti-Semitic conspiracy theories alleging that they and other Jews clandestinely manipulate world events for their advantage….

White did not return calls for comment. In a series of text messages, he confirmed the voice in the video is his but expressed surprise that his remarks might be construed as anti-Semitic.

See? The Democratic Party really is a big tent; it too has anti-Semites — and exceptionally clueless ones.

I of course knew that the Rothschilds — along with the Illuminati, Freemasons, Bilderbergers and New World Orderers — controlled world events. What I didn't know was that that included atmospheric happenings.

Seeing that, one would understandably think that the erstwhile party of Lincoln had gathered its better angels, as a whole, and "warned" Trump to leave Bob Mueller alone. But, no.

The correct headline would have been: "Seven Republicans warn Trump: Leave Mueller alone." The seven are Speaker Ryan, Rep. Gowdy, and Sens. Flake, Graham, Grassley, Rubio and Lankford. Sen. Rand Paul is included in CNN's pro-Mueller roundup for some inexplicable reason (he says virtually nothing in defense of Mueller), otherwise he would have made all of eight.

So, seven Republican congressmen out of nearly 300 either critically appeared on the Sunday shows yesterday or sent a statement of admonition, though it seems not one other — other than Sen. McCain — bothered to text, tweet or fax a similar message over the weekend: Hands off the special counsel, Mr. President. Or, as Sen. Graham put it, "[If Trump fires Mueller], that would be the beginning of the end of his presidency."

Other "warnings" ranged from Gowdy's if-Trump-is-innocent-he-should-act-like-it to Ryan's typically mealy-mouthed mush of non-committalism: "As the Speaker has always said, Mr. Mueller and his team should be able to do their job," said a spokeswoman. "When asked," adds CNN, "[she] did not comment directly on whether Congress should advance legislation to protect Mueller."

In conversation with Politico's excellent Susan Glasser, Rep. Adam Schiff had this to say. “I think one of the really sad realizations over the last year is … how many members of Congress would be unwilling to stand up to him, and more than that, would be completely willing to carry water for him…. I thought there would be more … people who would defend our system of checks and balances, would speak out for decency, who would defend the First Amendment."

I still believe there will be. But I'll have to wait until Trump fires Mueller before my belief can be confirmed. (I'm sorry to say that this belief is little more than a hunch.) The equally sad realization is that in its general indifference or inaction to Trump's lawlessness and indecency, the Republican Party is advancing the odds of a constitutional crisis; it's making it more likely, that is, that Trump will indeed fire Mueller.

This could be a promising development, defusing the rising tensions on the Korean Peninsula and across Asia.

Maureen Dowd, on Trump's competence in sitting down with Kim Jong-un (or anyone else out to hoodwink an imbecile):

The one thing his presidency has definitively proven is that he doesn’t have the foggiest idea how to prepare for a negotiation, let alone negotiate.

Somewhere in Zakaria's brain, or perhaps his bleeding heart, is an inexorable fondness for imagining that Trump can function as would a normal human being with a normal grasp of what's needed in most any situation — instead of who he really is, which is a brooding, boastfully ignorant cretin who'd be selling timeshare right now were it not for millions in inheritance. I'm not sure why Zakaria is entranced by these flights of asinine fantasy, other than he wants to be seen as scrupulously fair and balanced. But this, his reveries do not accomplish. What they do accomplish is making Zakaria look like a wistful fool.

Of no swampy surprise whatsoever is that Trump is using taxpayers' money to make a reelection campaign trip to New Hampshire today. His journey is being officially and fraudulently invoiced as an opioid-battling trip — and in this case, the dreaded opioids go by the brand names of Sen. Jeff Flake and Gov. John Kasich.

In the Granite State, which he lost to Hillary Clinton by only 0.4 percent, Trump nevertheless is in big trouble. While 60 percent of New Hampshire's Republican primary voters say they'll vote for him in 2020, his approval rating is a mere 36 percent among all the state's voters. Flake and Kasich are wagering this statistical spread will narrow, downward.

Last week, the Trump-loathing Arizona senator gave a speech to a "crowd of business leaders and political junkies" at a NH Institute of Politics event, where he "decr[ied] the 'degradation of the United States and her values' by the current occupant of the White House." According to the Washington Post, Flake received a "rare" standing ovation. Next month, Ohio's governor will seek the same at a college event in Henniker.

The former chairman of the NH Republican State Committee told the Post, "I’m certain that Trump will draw a serious primary challenger. A lot of voters are getting tired of this act." Yet Trump's hole card, as noted, is primary voters, who tend to seek the outside rims of political sanity.

Alas, neither are Democrats immune from this malady — and in their case, it is closing in two years earlier.

As Politico reports, "Moderate Democrats say the upset in Pennsylvania shows it’s obvious [Conor] Lamb’s playbook is what other candidates should mimic in [similar] districts." Obvious indeed, although the bloody obvious upsets idealistic blind men such as Adam Green, co-founder of the Progressive Change Campaign Committee. As he told Politico, in its paraphrase, his group is not "shying away from taking on moderate Democrats in upcoming primaries, especially in districts that lean Republican." My emphasis. And I want to cry.

The co-chairman of the Congressional Progressive Caucus, Arizona's Rep. Raul Grijalva, took a different tack: erecting a straw man. He told Politico that "People [who] say [Lamb's] is the direction all of us should take are kind of missing where the energy is coming from." What Grijalva is missing (intentionally) is that no one is saying "all" Democratic candidates should take Lamb's direction. Indeed if there's any unanimity of wrongheaded opinion, it comes from progressive activists who demand that all Democratic candidates take their direction.

Credit to Illinois' Rep. Cheri Bustos, who, though not a Blue Dog, ventured the monumentally obvious in a rather understated way: "I think if we run people who are far left in swing districts or districts that might lean a little bit Republican" — clear throat — "we’re not going to be successful."

This morning, the always reasonable progressive E.J. Dionne asks, "In 2018, one priority truly outranks all others: Will Democrats take hold of at least one house of Congress to provide a real check on President Trump’s abuses?" By this singular outranking Dionne means to ask, Will Democrats foolishly nominate ideologically ill-fit candidates in swing districts? I can't say if he also meant his answer to be a subtle dig at the usual method of nomination, but that's the way I read it: "[Lamb] was picked by a party committee, not in a primary."

Swinging back to the presidential level, I do wonder who, in assured anonymity, members of the Republican National Committee would nominate. I suspect they'd head in the same direction as the state's overall voters, since the primary process is a radically perilous one.

I'll conclude this piece with an agreeable aside. "Last month’s Granite State Poll found Biden to be the most popular among potential Democratic candidates," reports the Post, "drawing 35 percent of the support from primary voters."

March 18, 2018

The pressure on Trump is reaching a critical mass. Yesterday he neurotically tweeted more Capt. Queegian hysterics which suggest that he's reaching the explosive end of his tolerance for Bob Mueller's ever-wider-ranging investigation.

Just prior to this public breakdown, he ordered his personal attorney, John Dowd, to gin up yet more intimidation of the Justice Department. In a statement to the Daily Beast, Dowd did the bidding of his frenetic client: "I pray that Acting Attorney General Rosenstein will follow the brilliant and courageous example of the FBI Office of Professional Responsibility and Attorney General Jeff Sessions and bring an end to alleged Russia Collusion investigation manufactured by McCabe’s boss James Comey based upon a fraudulent and corrupt Dossier.”

Then came the customary Trumpian change of stories. When asked, Dowd at first said he was speaking for the president — "Yes as his counsel." Which is how the Daily Beast reported it. But once the story went online, Dowd "emailed to say he was actually speaking in his personal capacity, and not on the president’s behalf." Far from trying to escape even the appearance of duplicity, as most any political operation would, this White House takes pride in its lying and insists that you know it is doing just that.

The magnitude of outrage over the truly contemptible McCabe Affair can be measured by John Brennan's reaction. Merely a year or two ago, could anyone have envisioned that a former director of the CIA would aim such a fireball of loathing at a sitting president of the United States? "When the full extent of your venality, moral turpitude, and political corruption becomes known," wrote Brennan on Twitter, "you will take your rightful place as a disgraced demagogue in the dustbin of history. You may scapegoat Andy McCabe, but you will not destroy America ... America will triumph over you."

Speaking on CNN, Rep. Charlie Dent, a retiring member of Trump's party, almost elegiacally intensified his warnings as to the partisan peril of Trumpism. "All this continuing chaos and drama that we’re seeing with the Tillerson firing, the McCabe firing, Stormy Daniels, all this stuff, this is having an impact on Republicans down ballot…. This is 5-alarm fire. We simply just can’t dismiss the [Pennsylvania] election on Tuesday to local events… It’s about these larger issues of this toxic political environment we find ourselves in."

And the toxicity of this political environment, I would wager, is about to increase tenfold.

For months I have puzzled over Trump's inaction — his resistance to firing Mueller, which was the only way out of the lethal predicament he put himself in. Only before the special counsel's accumulation of incontestably damning evidence against the president could Trump have survived the uproar over a Nixonlike massacre. Most of Mueller's eventual findings would have never come to light; thus with a lazy, complicit, equally damnable Republican Congress, Trump, most likely, could have slipped out of the net. But he sat and did nothing, instead allowing Mueller to amass proof of indictable — or impeachable — offenses. This, Trump did on the advice of surrounding White House guidance.

Since then, however, Trump has systematically (as systemically as the shambolic Trump can) been cleaning house of any unTrumpian influence. Only recently has it occurred to Trump that he — not his staff — is the president, thus he can do whatever he wishes to do; therefore the idiotic move of imposing steel and aluminum tariffs, followed by the replacement of Gary Cohn with the barkingly incompetent, relentlessly malfunctioning Larry Kudlow.

That, though, was a relative nothing compared to what's coming. Trump's characterological instability, emotional fragility and intellectual vacancy will next combine molecularly to produce a Big Bang of breathtaking political profanity. He will see to it that Bob Mueller is shown the door, and Trump will believe — because of his wholesale incapacity to ever think two moves ahead — that that will be that. Problems over.

Rather, he will be met by the fire and fury of a national upheaval never before seen. Many of his heretofore allies in Congress will run for cover as Trump's crowning act of obstruction is laid out for all to see. Brennan's prediction will then materialize. America will triumph over Trump.

March 17, 2018

"It is well documented that he has had some very troubling behavior and by most accounts a bad actor,” said White House Press Secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders of the former deputy director of the FBI, Andrew McCabe, the day before he was viciously fired and deprived of significant retirement benefits.

Yes, McCabe is a real bad hombre, as Sanders' boss would say. Or, as McCabe himself put it, in his 21 years as a special agent, "I spent half of that time investigating Russian Organized Crime as a street agent and Supervisor in New York City. I have spent the second half of my career focusing on national security issues and protecting this country from terrorism." The NY Times reports that "senior F.B.I. officials and [McCabe's] counterparts in other agencies praised his intellect and ability to manage complicated worldwide national security issues."

His one transgression was in failing to act as a Donald Trump toady. Somewhat surprising is that the president refrained from having McCabe obliterated by anti-aircraft artillery or subjected to a military-grade nerve agent, as other Dear Leaders are inclined to do. Doubtless, Trump has penal envy. But destroying a man's reputation and financial security on the verge of retirement — and then publicly, childishly, cruelly boasting about it — was the next best thing.

It seems the authoritarian sinless are forever the victims of lies and corruption by others, and of course they bemoan the intolerable damage this does to Democracy and hard-working little people. Someone must champion virtue in every one-party state, and here in America that thankless job has fallen to Donald J. Trump, man of selflessness.

McCabe has a rather different take on all this — all this being "what can happen," as he said in a statement last night, "when law enforcement is politicized, public servants are attacked, and people who are supposed to cherish and protect our institutions become instruments for damaging those institutions and people." McCabe first itemized what had happened to him, and subsequently implied what's about to happen to Trump.

He called for my firing. He called for me to be stripped of my pension after more than 20 years of service. And all along [my wife and I] have said nothing, never wanting to distract from the mission of the FBI by addressing the lies told and repeated about us.

No more.

Before his discounted defenestration — the loss of full retirement pay and, probably, medical benefits — McCabe had much to lose. Now, he has much less. Because of Trump's unfailing inability to ever think two moves ahead, McCabe's abusive sacking provides him with more incentive than ever to be "a significant witness in whatever the special counsel comes up with," as he presaged to Politico in a pre-firing interview. There are witnesses and there are hostile witnesses — and Trump just did what he could to see that McCabe is as hostile as hostility comes.

If Trump believed McCabe was a bad FBI hombre yesterday, he need only wait until tomorrow to see just how much he underestimated the agency's former deputy director, who's about to testify arm in arm with the former director, also abused by Trump. The latter's vindictiveness is one of those "own worst enemy" things, but Trump is just too damn stupid to see it.

March 16, 2018

Twice weekly my patience is rewarded by another of Michael Gerson's incensed columns about the eminently appalling Mr. Trump. Everyone does it; it is political commentary's most booming industry, mostly because it writes itself. But there's something especially gratifying about Trump-bashing from highly literate conservatism.

White House insiders indicate that Trump’s increasingly flailing decisions are the function of a president gaining in confidence. Having decided that he has gotten the hang of the job, Trump has lost patience with opposition and constraints. He seems not frightened but giddy.

What does this mean for Trump’s presidency? Paradoxically, the man with complete trust in his own instincts is easily manipulated. Because Trump lacks historical and ideological grounding for his views, the content of his instincts often seems determined by the last person who captures his attention. This was true of [South Korea's] Chung, who could quickly sell a massive change in U.S. diplomatic strategy in East Asia to a leader who knows little about diplomacy, strategy or East Asia. But Trump came away from the meeting convinced, I imagine, that the whole thing was his idea….

Republicans can no longer dismiss this as evidence of inexperience. It is getting worse as a failing president becomes more confident of his own judgment. And more disconnected from reality.

Neither will this shocking charge instigate a legitimate congressional inquiry. House Republicans are busy defaming the FBI and the Senate is languishing in McConnellesque indifference to the assorted abominations of Trumpism.

The allegation is, of course, just that: an allegation. But nothing is unbelievable in this Age of Trump; indeed the more outrageous, the more more tawdry and the more mobsterlike the allegation, the more believable it is.

The president of the United States is a street thug surrounded by media and congressional caporegimes whose principal mission is to protect the Don. And the country is being "governed" accordingly. The supreme irony of this national crisis is that the United States may yet be rescued by — a porn star.

There's general — indeed, almost inarguable — agreement that the Republican Party is in existential trouble, which was pointedly validated this week by the variable of a Democrat's victory in a very red Pennsylvania district. The validating "constant" is that the Republican Party is led by a buffoonish charlatan who, with the strong support of his party, is hostile to all that is decent, wise, honorable and — sustainable. This simply cannot go on, as they say. Either the party reforms or it dies.

But reform how? Answering that question may prove to be harder than actually reforming the party. For even the reformers don't seem to understand the party they wish to reform. Yesterday, for instance, Sen. Jeff Flake said at the National Press Club that "Republicans want to be reminded, I think [I don't], of what conservatism really means: limited government, economic freedom, free trade, reverence for the free press, immigration." Flake's supporting cast of policy positions is all well and good, but he omitted what's been the star of the party for decades: tax cuts.

As Paul Krugman notes this morning, "For at least the past 40 years, the G.O.P.’s central policy goal has been upward redistribution of income: lower taxes for the wealthy," which will necessarily lead to "big cuts in programs that help the poor and the middle class." Politically, that would be just peachy were it not for the imperishable problem that "This policy agenda is … deeply unpopular." Republicans have succeeded nonetheless by "master[ing] the tactics of bait and switch," writes Krugman, plus rolling out Huey Long-type reactionaryism as well as "racial, cultural and religious enmity."

All three of which Republican strategists desperately executed in PA-18. They tried selling the recent tax cuts as a middle-class bonanza — a lie that did nothing positive for the Republican candidate's numbers. They tried hustling the benefits of anachronistic mercantilism — another foolishness the electorate didn't buy, "perhaps because many Pennsylvania voters realize … the old days aren’t coming back," speculates Krugman. And finally they opted for the emotional gut-punching of claiming that Democrats hate both country and God. The success of that strategy, too, was told in the election's outcome.

It seems, then, that well-worn Republican strategies of distraction are wearing too thin, but more important, that the old standby — the splendor of tax cuts — is losing its appeal. That's a mammoth problem for the GOP, for as Catherine Rampell reminds us this morning, the rabidly conservative Robert Novak once observed that "God put the Republicans on Earth to cut taxes. If they don't cut taxes, they have no overriding rationale for existence." (In line with that truism, Republicans are now planning yet another tax-cut bill. Said Trump, Wednesday: "We're actually going for a phase two which will help — in addition to middle class, it will help companies and it's going to be something I think very special." Uh-huh.)

And yet, Sen. Flake excluded tax cuts from his litany of "real conservatism." If reformer Flake fails to appreciate "the G.O.P.'s central policy goal" of the last 40 years, or if he is too embarrassed by its catastrophic simplicity to mention it, what's left to reform the party — what is left, that is, to organize collective enthusiasm around it? Absent tax cuts heaped on other tax cuts that follow tax cuts, what is left of the Republican Party?

Without them, it is dead, for it would singularly possess no reason for being, as Novak remarked. What — Democrats oppose smartly sized government and "economic freedom" and immigration and "reverence for the free press"?

So there's Republicans' really big problem. Even if they jettison the buffoonish charlatan they now have in charge, voters, it seems, are catching on to not only the fraud of more and more tax cuts but the debt-strangling calamity of more and more tax cuts. Yet without them, there is no Republican Party. They'll need to come up with some other reason for being. But not even reformer Jeff Flake has a clue as to what that might be.

March 15, 2018

Vanity Fair's Gabriel Sherman reports on more changes rumored to come to the White House.

Oh. Shit.

"Last Tuesday, Trump met with ultra-hawkish former U.N. ambassador John Bolton in the Oval Office to discuss" the brutal molestation of H.R. McMaster's job as national security adviser. Bolton's sole qualification is that he wants to bomb everyone, which, given enough Washingtonese, can be made to resemble a "doctrine." But what has upset Trump about McMaster more than anything? That the latter has been consulting with President Obama's capable national security adviser. "Trump kept saying" to Bolton, "Can you believe it? To Susan Rice. Can you believe it?"

Trump also wants to fire Attorney General Jeff Sessions and replace him with EPA's "cone-of-silence" administrator, Scott Pruitt, probably so Pruitt can then fire Special Counsel Robert Mueller, or, barring that, reduce his annual operating budget to that of The Carpentariat.

Last, according to Sherman's reporting, is that Trump is set on a humanitarian mission for the children, senior advisers Jared and Ivanka. "Trump has told people for months that he wants them to go back to New York," writes Sherman. Said a presidential friend, "Trump wants them out of there. He thinks they’ve been getting hit too hard." But just wait until the indictments fall. Hence the need to fire Sessions and hire Pruitt to fire Mueller.

Not mentioned by Sherman is the rumor of Rick Perry replacing David Shulkin. Perry doesn't know any more about veterans affairs than he does about energy, so, Why the hell not?

But, as far as we know, a pediatric neurosurgeon in charge of housing and urban development is so perfectly incompetent where is, he is perfectly safe.

Here is the Trump Organization's statement in response to "the first evidence of an individual employed by the Trump Organization — other than [Michael] Cohen — being involved in an ongoing legal battle regarding [Stormy] Daniels' alleged affair with Trump":

The Trump Organization is not representing anyone and, with the exception of one of its California based attorneys in her individual capacity facilitating the initial filing ... the company has had no involvement in [hush-ups and payoffs].

Translation: Except for the Trump Organization's involvement, the Trump Organization had no involvement.

Highly (almost but not perfectly) accurate prenatal screening tests can reveal Down syndrome in utero. The expectant couple can then decide to extinguish the fetus and try again for a normal child who might be less trouble, at least until he or she is an adolescent with hormonal turbulence and a driver’s license.

In Iceland, upward of 85 percent of pregnant women opt for the prenatal testing, which has produced a Down syndrome elimination rate approaching 100 percent. Agusta [photo] was one of only three Down syndrome babies born there in 2009. Iceland could have moved one-third of the way to its goal if only Agusta had been detected and eliminated. Agusta’s mother is glad the screening failed in her case.

When my wife was pregnant, her obstetrician — a Catholic — advised us that he would not perform an abortion, should prenatal testing reveal a fetal issue such as Down syndrome. He said we would need to go elsewhere, if an abortion was our choice. Did we think it would be? he asked. There was silence for a few seconds. I then offered my opinion. Well, it's the really smart people who keep fucking up the world, I said, so I can't see why we would have a problem with a harmless Down child. My wife quickly agreed.

I certainly don't condemn others who might make a different choice, but that was ours — although we were never tested by the real thing.

Democrat Conor Lamb's victory in Pennsylvania's crimson 18th suggests something of a mild paradox: In red congressional districts, Democratic challengers might well find success running against Paul Ryan, even though what made Democratic challenges even feasible is widespread disaffection with Trump.

This, it seems, goes to a fundamental falseness in electoral politics. Speaker Ryan isn't the sort of personality likely to stir the antagonistic passions of center-right voters. Trump's chaos, Trump's incompetence, Trump's colossal immaturity did that. But while Pennsylvania Republicans voted for Trump, they never voted for Paul Ryan. Thus they were compelled to take out their frustrations with Trump on essentially a bystander: the speaker of the House. In other words, these Republicans made a huge mistake in 2016 and they know it, but most are not about to admit it.

This was one of Congressman-elect Lamb's insights into how to beat the crap out of his opponent, Rick Saccone — who, it should be acknowledged, assisted Lamb at every turn. (Saccone, writes a local political reporter, "was a wet blanket of a candidate, without a scintilla of charisma. He also didn’t particularly care for campaigning, organized few public rallies and rarely took to the streets to speak with voters.") Yet perhaps better than Saccone's haplessness was Lamb's recognition of humanity's general unwillingness to concede a monumental mistake, even when its result mortifies the nation daily from the Oval Office. Lamb mostly left Trump alone, going after Ryan instead — thereby cosseting the guilty consciences of Pa.'s 18th CD.

"The battle for a district in suburban and rural areas around Pittsburgh underscored the degree to which Mr. Trump’s appeal has receded across the country," observes the Times in a post-election assessment. In short, Trump is the supreme problem, and most everyone knows it. Lamb, however, "saved his most blunt criticism for Mr. Ryan, highlighting the speaker’s ambitions to overhaul Social Security and Medicare." Concludes the Times: "Lamb’s approach could become a template for a cluster of more moderate Democrats contesting conservative-leaning seats."

This necessarily modifies my original advice to all Democratic candidates, which, as you may recall, was to focus on Trump. While that advice holds in blue districts, Lamb's strategy suggests that Ryan is the more useful target in red ones. (Unlike Larry Kudlow and hyperidealistic progressives, my advice adjusts to facts and empirical evidence.)

While we're on the uplifting subject of Conor Lamb's electoral success, I want to add a couple notations from Nate Silver. First he adduces Cook Political Report’s observation that "turnout in Democratic-leaning Allegheny County equaled 67 percent of presidential-year turnout, but voters turned out at only 60 percent of presidential levels in Republican-leaning Westmoreland County." This led to Silver's second "finding," of sorts: "That sort of turnout gap suggests that registered-voter polls could be underrating Democrats in this year’s midterms — and could turn a challenging year for Republicans into a catastrophic one"; a kind of "Democratic mega-tsunami."

March 14, 2018

"Larry Kudlow will be the next director of the National Economic Council, succeeding Gary Cohn as President Donald Trump's top economic adviser, a person close to the matter said.

"Trump offered the job to Kudlow, an economic analyst and television personality, over the phone Tuesday night while Kudlow was at dinner in Manhattan, and he accepted, the person said."

To call Kudlow an "economic analyst" is to call Jack Kevorkian an emergency care physician. Kudlow hasn't felt compelled to genuinely analyze an economic question since before the 1980s. Just wind him up and his little cymbals clash while he repeatedly yelps: Cut taxes!

Kudlow is also a free trader to the core, but above even that, as Trump knows, is that Kudlow will bow and genuflect and debase himself in any way his Dear Leader commands. Trump insists he wants a diversity of opinion. But if that were true, he would have opted for Austan Goolsbee rather than Larry Kudlow.

In a University of Chicago survey of 43 notable economists, "not a single one said" Trump's steel and aluminum tariffs will be a net positive.

Most of the respondents submitted typical economistlike comments, such as "the overall benefits are likely to be quite limited, and losses larger." However the former chairman of the Council of Economic Advisers under President Obama, Austan Goolsbee, who is now with the University of Chicago's Booth School of Business, submitted a "slightly more animated" comment: "SMACK. SMACK [punching self in face] SMACK. SMACK."

It seems that was the overall comment submitted last night by 2016 Trump supporters in southwestern Pennsylvania, too.

I don't normally become emotional over technocratic issues such as international trade, tariffs, intellectual property rights and the like, but Trump's repudiation of the Trans-Pacific Partnership agreement still breaks my heart.

President Obama recognized America's forward-looking need to build more liberal economic relationships with Pacific Rim nations — which account for about 40 percent of the world's GDP — as well as to acquire significant leverage over the globe's second largest economy and, too often, flagrant trade abuser, China. Thus did Obama labor, against domestic ignorance and bipartisan demagoguery, to establish the United States as a leader in Pacific trade.

Then Trump came along and threw it all away. It was a heartbreaking act of almost incomprehensible imbecility. Today, in asking what an intelligent, responsible president would do about American trade, Tom Friedman recalls the Pacific pact — and similarly breaks his own heart.

What would a smart American president do? First, he’d sign the Trans-Pacific Partnership trade accord. TPP eliminated as many as 18,000 tariffs on U.S. exports with the most dynamic economies in the Pacific and created a 12-nation trading bloc headed by the U.S. and focused on protecting what we do best — high-value-added manufacturing and intellectual property. Alas, Trump tore it up without reading it — one of the stupidest foreign policy acts ever. We Brexited Asia! China was not in TPP. It was a coalition built, in part, to pressure Beijing into fairer market access, by our rules. Trump just gave it up for free.

In his customary brawn-over-brains fashion, Trump is reported to be pressuring aides to devise plans to slam China with "steep tariffs" — which will of course be reciprocated — rather than taking Obama's sophisticated approach. To watch the country I still love and once respected be whiplashed by the ill-schooled, primeval gruntings of a $20 whore is almost more than my stoic masculinity can take.

It's nearly 3am as I write this, while millions await the final count in Pennsylvania's Lamb-Saccone contest. (The smart ones are doing it asleep.) Splendid it would be if Lamb — who has already declared victory — officially won the race. But, in every other way and no matter what, he already has.

This, everyone knows, although Republicans will persist in denying it. I noticed (on Twitter) Laura Ingraham's choice of pre-denial, which was to declare the Democratic candidate essentially a Republican; thus either way, a Republican triumphs. Pretty slick, but wrong. While Lamb is necessarily soft on guns and tariffs, he is anti-abortion while nonetheless supporting abortion rights and he opposed the GOP's tax bill as a "giveaway" to the rich. These are fundamental disagreements with Republicanism.

The key passage in the NYT's late-night coverage of the race is this: "[Lamb's] approach may signal to other Democrats that they can pursue more moderate swing voters without sacrificing the support of the party’s liberal base, at least in districts that will tolerate deviations from party orthodoxy." If liberals — more precisely, progressives — are willing to sacrifice ideological purity in Pennsylvania, I can't see why they wouldn't in Florida or Colorado. As far as I know, we're not that balkanized — not yet, anyway.

Still unanswered is the question of whether Lamb beat the Republican Saccone or the Republican Trump. The Times reports that "Few Republicans publicly said Mr. Trump was at fault for the race’s closeness," yet, more broadly, Saccone was also taking on Republican water. The GOP has bumbled about as badly as Trump, its generic ballot position is underwater by as much as 20 percent, and the party hasn't had an original idea since … well, I've hit a blank wall, which tells you just how long it's been.

The GOP is mostly a threat to the welfare of average Americans rather than a policy generator, which, as the Times notes, "present[s] Democrats the chance to portray themselves as a political safe harbor." Pretty much all Lamb had to do was avoid extremes, while letting his Republican opponent utter characteristic party idiocies such as Democrats are motivated by "a hatred for God."

In Politico's coverage, this amused: "National Democrats joined Lamb in claiming victory, even as Republican groups protested it was premature." Republican "groups" certainly know something about premature judgments, given the Trump groupies on the House Intelligence Committee who decided to exonerate the guilty-as-hell president before actually conducting — let alone actually concluding — an actual investigation.